Relationships of trust and understanding within your own business are crucial to every success. You may have relationships with key players from your in-house departments who play a part in the full cycle of your service delivery or product offering. Maybe your business relies on external suppliers to advise you of product choices, changes with demand, or best route to market. Your IBM software investment is no different!

In fact, as a foundation to your business processes and the interface to your customers, it could be the most important asset for which you need an experienced guide to work alongside.

IBM Accelerated Value Leaders (AVLs), are Trusted Advisors and client advocates who work with their assigned customers to learn about their businesses, their challenges, their infrastructures, and their goals. AVLs are seen as virtual members of the customer's team, but with many additional advantages! As a single point of contact, they are the customer's voice inside IBM, and they have a direct relationship with the IBM resources that can make a huge positive difference to customer's business changing decisions.

When should we upgrade? What is our longer-term strategy? How can we meet our business needs? How can we reduce our costs? What tools can we deploy to speed up performance? What should we be looking at to reduce time to market? How do we minimize risk? Is there a faster route to resolving issues? How can we adopt new technologies quickly? ... and more... much more.

AVLs are the nucleus of IBM's Software Accelerated Value Program, providing a valuable service by working alongside their customers, expertly steering projects (such as software migrations) to successful and profitable conclusions, providing crucial knowledge transfer along the way. When is comes to issue management (PMRs), Accelerated Value Program clients receive priority call handling. However, as prevention is more efficient than cure, customers with this Program will benefit significantly from the AVL's proactive problem prevention element of the offering.

Have you pulled together your platform upgrade plans for 2014? Do you know if your IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) environment will be supported on the platforms you plan on upgrading?

Be sure you know what platforms are supported before you upgrade so as to avoid unnecessary surprises and downtime.

The following system requirements information will help you identify what platforms are supported. Included is a list of platforms that we no longer plan to support in 2014. This information is being provided to assist you in making plans to migrate to newer supported versions and is important to consider before you begin upgrading your CLM environments:

A collection of web-based education courses for various Rational products are now available for free! The information in these courses provide information that is relevant for Rational products such as Rational Application Developer, DOORS, and ClearCase. This archive is provided for your free use, as-is, with no planned updates or maintenance. Click the link to check out the available course topics.

If you are a new user of Rational Developer for System z (RD/z), this document is intended to help you get started on debugging Cobol programs on z/OS. The example shown here is for a simple Cobol program for a batch runtime environment.

It is assumed that you have installed RD/z (for example RDZ 9.0) on your client platform, and have set up connection to the RD/z host component using Remote System Explorer.

The images show in this document are from from RD/z client. It is assumed that you are working on an RD/z Eclipse client IDE and are familiar with navigation on the IDE.

Step 1: Verify that debug Listener is configured and operational

Switch to Debug Perspective:

Click on UI Daemon Listener:

Typically the listener will be listening on port 8002.

Step 2: Set the property group for the program to be debugged

In this example we select program MYMAIN.cbl in a z/OS project .

In the property group, set the normal Cobol compile settings, and select the Run tab

Step 3 - Select the program and debug

To debug the program you will create a JCL file for compile link and go. the go step will contact the listening daemon.

In this case the JCL is in a member named MYMAIN in MAHADEV.BATCH.JCL

After the generation of JCL is complete, you may submit it to launch the debugger.

Are you following us on your preferred social channel? Did you know we've launched both a GooglePlus and Tumblr blog in the last year?

While no channel is meant to be a catch-all, we want to get you the information you want and need in the channels you are most comfortable. Do you find twitter is the best place to find our content and engage with us? Follow us there! Twitter not your style but rather you prefer Facebook? We're posting there as well. Like to be cutting edge? try following our GooglePlus and/or Tumblr blog to help you find the right information at the right time! Check out our news document linked below to see all the channels on which we're active and follow us on the ones you're most comfortable.

And, without losing sight of the work we do in the newer social channels, we also want to ensure you don't forget about some of the most effective community based channels out there surrounding Rational products and topics. Finding answers from previous questions, or even direct community based help with your own specific question can be a great way to leverage the collective wisdom, but even better is when you can join in the conversations and share your own expertise to help others.

While the above are great resources for truly social support with clients and IBMers alike all participating, we also recognize that this isn't a complete list of all the forums or social channels out there. Is your favourite one missing? Let us know in the comments and we'll add it to the list! Or, do you have some other favourite method for finding answers or sharing answers which we haven't touched on? We'd love to hear about those as well!